Welcome to part 3 of the Master Your Budget series!
The last installment of this series is going to cover Bills and Expenses. We hit this topic a little bit in part 1, but we are going to dig deeper!
Check out Part 1 here and Part 2 here✨
Adulting is hard. I’ve said it before and I will say it a million times over, and bills make it even harder! When starting the Master Your Budget series, the entire goal was to help you become more comfortable talking about money, asking money questions, and manage your own budget with ease. To wrap it up, let’s break down…
Bills
What are bills? Bills are your expenses that accrue when you use a product or a service. Not all bills have the same due date, and not everyone has the same bills. If you are responsible for paying bills for the first time, or are still getting the hang of it, I encourage you to keep reading! I have a method that keeps everything on track to ensure we never forget to pay a bill.
Types of Bills
In your adult life, you will run into many different types of bills/expenses. You will have reoccurring bills that you have to pay every month for the duration of your use, there will be bills that you have to pay for a certain amount of time that are done once you have paid off your debt, and there are one-time expenses that you will acquire if you purchase something large or out of the blue.
Either way, you will need to plan for all types of expenses within your budget.
In Part 1, we talked about figuring out what your entire budget is. You looked at your income and now have a solid number as to what you are bringing in to live off of (this includes your grocery budget, rent/mortgage, putting money in savings, and bills). Now that you know what that number is, it is time to prepare to pay for your bills!
As we talked about, your pay day ritual is important. I am going to walk you through what I do when we get paid to take care of our bills and make sure we have enough to last us the rest of the month!
- The first thing I do is move the remaining money from the previous month over to savings. Our goal is to save as much as we can, so every remaining penny has been put into our holding account. Sometimes it’s quite a bit, and sometimes its literal pennies😂 but anything is better than nothing.
- Next, I fill out our bill tracker (I made one just for you, check it out below⬇️) so I know what has and has not been paid. On the tracker, I have all of our bills listed, the date they are due, if they have been paid and the amount they are. I have as many of our bills set up on autopay as I can so they come directly out of our account, that way I don’t have to always wonder if they have been paid and I know it is taken care of. There are a handful of bills that don’t pay at the beginning of the month so I check every few days to make sure there is enough money in the account to cover those bills and our other expenses.
- Once I double-check the remaining amount in our account, I make a plan for groceries and fun money. Usually we use our credit card for gas and groceries because we get the most points on our card for those purchases, so we sit down and discuss what our goal is for the month on the credit card and make a plan to stick to it so we remain within budget for the next month.
- From there, all that’s left to do is keep ourselves accountable and steward our money well. There have been times where we have had to dip into our holding/savings account to cover expenses that have popped up, but it has been a blessing that we have been able to do since we made a plan to save as much as we could.
I know that money talk is overwhelming, and it is hard to wrap your thoughts around debt or bills…or even picking a starting point in taking care of your expenses. But I hope that this series helped you, even just a little.
I made you a Bills and Expenses tracker to get started, and I pray that it brings you peace of mind about your monthly budget! Download it below⬇️
Before you go, you have a little bit of homework…I want you to start out this next month by tracking your bills. Create a list of every single bill you have and keep track of the total amounts on the Bills and Expenses Tracker. Account for them in your total budget and see what you have leftover- that will be what you have to function off of to eat/pay for gas/allow for fun money. You will use the tracker to physically check off when a bill has been paid so they are all accounted for. As a bonus and to take it to another level, KEEP EVERY RECEIPT and check the total with what you have spent during the month…for every cash, check, and debit/credit transaction!
I know that it seems like a lot now, but you will have it down in no time!
Happy Tracking, Friend!
